We're somewhere south of Bridgwater as I start formulating this second blog post in my head, with three and a half hours of M5 still ahead of us and a SECOND cool bag I bought specifically for this trip quietly defrosting in the boot. As always it is very full.
Most British motorway service stations are depressing holes. There. I said it. The grey strip-lit concourses, the queue for a tepid sausage roll, the £6.50 small Costa coffee, the desperate dance of children scampering to a toilet that smells of regret. Ten miles of motorway in every direction, and somehow they've all agreed to be exactly the same.
There are two exceptions. They face each other across the M5 between junctions 11A and 12. Northbound and southbound, both with the same grass-roofed shape, both run by the Westmorland family, the same Cumbrian lot who started this whole "actually good motorway services" thing at Tebay on the M6 back in the seventies apparently. They call them Gloucester Services. Most people who know them just call them "the farm shop one".
I'd add a detour to get to one if I had to. In fact I do, regularly.
This is the bit where I should probably say something measured about supporting local producers and the 130-odd farms within thirty miles whose produce fills the shelves. All of which is true, and the proper reason a place like myfoody is interested in it. But honestly the reason I keep going back is more selfish than that: the fresh bread by the door, the cheese counter where mum picks up her spreadable gorgonzola (too pungent for me, mum however could spread it on a damp tea towel and look pleased), the meat counter with sausages I've never seen anywhere else, the pick-and-mix biltong (yes, really), the whole section of giant chocolate teacakes that look like something a Victorian child would have asked for at Christmas. There is, somewhere in the middle, a piece of broccoli larger than my head.
Last month I (slightly begrudgingly) bought my eldest, Evie, her first car. By a stroke of staggering coincidence the dealership happened to be a few miles from Gloucester Services. I had three or four cars to choose between and the one I went with, and I want to be very clear about this dear reader, was definitely chosen on its merits. The fact that picking it up involved a stop at the farm shop was completely incidental. Completely. Leanne is not convinced. The girls aren't either.
That last visit when collecting the car, mum and I came home with a bag of reduced-to-clear sausages of varieties I couldn't have invented if I'd tried. They all went in the garage chest freezer where I put all my farm shop impulse purchases. Space is definitely at a premium now. We had some of the very nice 'pork fajita' flavour ones before coming away this week so that made a tiny small sausage tray shaped space for the trip home next Saturday at least.
This visit, I came away with a stuffed lamb breast for me and a chicken and ham pie for my slightly pickier wife and older daughter. The pie was in a freezer with a poster taped to the side listing prices for every other thing in there...lasagne, fish pies, fruit crumbles, the lot except the one I picked up. How expensive could it really be, I thought, sliding it into the basket.
Reader, it was eighteen pounds.
Eighteen. Pounds. For a pie that wasn't notably enormous, wasn't in a gold leaf pastry tray, and I cannot emphasise this enough only had pastry on the TOP. A LID. A lid, for £18. When it pinged up on the till I considered, for a brief and shameful moment, asking the lady to take it back. I did not. I am a coward. I just stared at the receipt and cried a little inside.
To be fair, it was a very good pie. I wasn't not going to eat any of it considering what it cost.
There's a lesson in here somewhere, and it ties back to why I started myfoody in the first place. Loving good food produce is a beautiful thing, and there is real value out there with proper sausages for £4, cheese from a counter rather than a vacuum pack, vegetables that actually taste like the thing they're meant to be. But there is also, as I have now learned at some personal cost, the possibility of getting carried away. Of paying a small fortune for something that, however good, isn't going to be quite as good as the price might suggest. The gems are real. So are the traps. The trick is knowing which is which and that, more or less, is what this whole little project is meant to help with.
We'll be coming back through the northbound side in five days. I'll be there. I'll be cheerful, I'll be hungry, I'll have the cool bags ready.
I will not be going anywhere near the pie freezer.
My favourite bakery in Fowey is open tomorrow. I'm hoping I can charm the owner into giving me his Stirata bread recipe so I can post myfoody's first recipe in exchange for a nice review on my site. He doesn't need to know that no one is reading it...yet 😉.